Life at SXU – Angelo Bonadonna's Blog

Letter to the Faculty of St. Norbert College

Explanatory Note: The entry below is another foray into the genre of the “unsent letter” (my welcome message last year to SXU President, Dr. Keith Elder, would be another example). The Internet allows distribution of messages far and wide that may or may not be picked up, so who knows, maybe this letter will be received somewhere? The writing is more of a “what if”—what would I say to …? More than influencing the actions and feelings of my audience, my goal is to bear witness to something true that has had a profound influence on me. My reflections attempt to make sense of my experience as a faculty member in a toxic, spiraling environment, and, possibly, to resonate with unknown colleagues. Ideally, I would offer, if only on a psychic level, solidarity and compassion.

February 7, 2025

I read Thomas Kunkel’s “Letter to the St Norbert College Board of Trustees” with both sadness and a strong sense of recognition. His questions and answers cover topics that are familiar to many of us at Saint Xavier University. I commend Dr. Kunkel for his approach, which was both objective and impassioned. In my past critiques of Dr. Joyner’s leadership, I too often lapsed into an emotional state. I find that happening even now, as I am, to be frank, triggered by the discussion. When Dr. Joyner was president of our university, I saw a pattern of behavior that was so extreme and damaging that, in pointing it out—and being ignored, or becoming a target myself—I often felt as though my head were exploding. I was shouting down a well.

So many of my colleagues were fearful of getting things wrong, and not being a part of the solution. Prior to Dr. Joyner’s arrival, we had just emerged out of a financial crisis (or crises: 1. an initiative for a remote campus in Arizona; and 2. an ill-fated international students project; plus others), and there was strong feeling that we needed a new approach. Many—most, if not all—felt that Dr. Joyner deserved a chance to lead. Some chastised her critics as entrenched, resistant to change, protective of privilege, and hostile to innovation.

As matters devolved, our institutional culture fractured. More and more of Dr. Joyner’s critics left the institution, many with buyouts and non-disclosure agreements. There was massive turnover at all levels of the institution, and not just among faculty. Staff left or were fired, and positions were eliminated or combined; administrators left, and positions were eliminated, combined, left empty, or filled with interims (interim was the default, perhaps poetically so). Such dynamics, one might argue, characterize the flux inevitable in institutional life; such change might set up conditions for positive developments? At SXU, the developments were depressing. Morale worsened, and that word became a taboo subject. Shared governance became a slogan that was preached, but decisions were increasingly made by Elon-Musk-style individuals and committees fashioned from unelected groups and task forces serving at the pleasure of the president.

There were some constants in this time of upheaval: Responsibility for decisions was always located in underlings, never the president herself. Initiatives offered by deans and others did not originate with the parties making the suggestions (as we were informed by allies in the administration), but rather the president herself. All throughout her tenure the drumbeat of crisis was pounded with intransigence: “Things might be bad now—or even kinda okay—but wait … the projections are dire. Enrollment will crash; without radical innovation and value added, our programs will be perceived as irrelevant.” Administrator-speak ran rampant, and on it went.

Dr. Joyner’s leadership was a wrecking ball at SXU. Things have intensified at SNC, if Dr. Kunkel’s fears and facts accurately characterize the state of things. His HLC worries are valid, but the thing about HLC and the degrading of reputations is they take some time to rear their heads and do their damage. At SXU, the cutting took some time to produce significant evisceration. The speed and efficiency of the dismantling are evidently more dramatic at SNC. The common thread is the increasing disregard for learning, scholarship, academic quality, mission, students, and, to a devastating degree, diversity, at least in our case, as our best faculty, both seasoned and early career, not to mention faculty of color and non-majority representation, left to seek out more hospitable environments.

Dr. Joyner left SXU when her record reflected positively on the bottom line, but before the dire effects of extreme disinvestment could manifest their worst and inevitable effects. Fortunately, SXU’s current administration, now largely purged of the worst enablers of Dr. Joyner’s approach, has shown commitment to rebuilding.

But what lies ahead? On a personal level, I long for healing of the wounds incurred over the years of struggle. I don’t want to demonize Dr. Joyner, and I care for her welfare as a human being. I always felt she had good intentions (Dr. Joyner’s stronger critics ridiculed me for being naïve and worse for this view). Misguided as her actions were, I always had the sense that Dr. Joyner was a “true believer” in the necessity or appropriateness of the approaches she took. She congratulates herself on Twitter because she and her consultants “get it” and are doing God’s work.

Her fault lies in her convictions, which waft a faintly perceptible “ends justifies the means” putrefaction as she makes decisions. Like a caring parent, she “knows” and is committed to pursuing what’s good for the kids, despite the noise and resistance her tough decisions set in motion. I have heard other critiques, however, that are less charitable, and devolve into amateur diagnoses of psychological aberrations as the only explanation of her approach to leadership. One thing is certain: she does activate an intense response, in multiple directions, in those she leads.

Stepping back from the tumult of Dr. Joyner’s impact on the faculty in the institutions she has led, we are left with the question of whether those institutions will survive, and—broadening out further—whether the model of higher education typified by small, private, liberal arts institutions will have a place in the landscape of higher education in the future. Will the academy persevere as a significant constituent of American society? And beyond America, will the idea of a university be recognizable? I hope we can shift the discussion from Dr. Joyner (a shift that is slightly easier for me these days than for my colleagues at SNC). I look at the traditions of SXU and SNC, the financial potentialities (if we can sidestep the fearmongering), the efficacy of wisdom and sacrifice in the service of stewardship, and I’ve got to think that with just a little more balance and collaboration and grace, the old mission and the new realities can find their way to viability.

January 23, 2025

[Note to Reader: What follows is my first SSW (Sustained Silent Writing) entry from Spring Semester, 2025. The prompt for today was twofold: (1) a student Xavierite journalist had asked me to share some thoughts for an article she was writing about Meg Carroll, whose death last month had shocked and saddened the University community; and (2) January 23. The two topics pointed in different and similar directions, a happy/sad accident.]

Meg Carroll was one of “those” people—someone special, someone indescribable, someone widely recognized as a legend while she is alive, and someone puzzled over after she is dead: “Could she really have been all that she seemed to be? Why are there not more like her? How could she be gone?”

Meg was a friend and colleague in many and varied respects. At meetings, I often waited for her contribution, and when she spoke, I hung on every word. She threaded the needle of incisive criticism on the one hand, and constructive input on the other. She had historical context, and was able to trace out the past, often contradictory, practices and policies. That was the incisive part. But she was the ultimate team player, and always worked on practical solutions, usually volunteering to chair a committee or find student teaching placements in late December for January teaching assignments [this specific service being her last professional miracle, just days before succumbing to becoming an actual angel in heaven, rather than just a human approximation on earth].

Over the course of our decades working together, I came to know Meg in increasingly warm and affectionate ways, learning new things about her past—a past that was surprisingly connected to mine (as I discovered, just a few years ago, that we hung with the same crowd in college, even to the point that her first husband, unbeknownst to me at the time, was a classmate of mine in the seminary).

Meg was wise and talented, but most of all she was kind and generous. The love she drew to her from so many students and friends and family gave her an aura that was almost visible. She represents the soul of SXU in its best potential. She was one of a kind, but oddly, also, a simple incarnation of what one would expect of a professor and friend, if such things could be materialized from their ideal form.

We are left with the clichés, “The good die young”; “We won’t see the likes of her again”; “The world is a much smaller and lesser place without her”… and on it goes.

So today, January 23, is the start of a new writing notebook in Advanced Writing. As has happened the past few years, the start of the notebook experience coincides with Angelo’s cycle of January-February that dominates my psyche with increasing weightiness each passing year. This was to be my last year of notebook keeping, but now that I’ve delayed retirement an additional year, I still find myself in the flow of the old routines. Will I still keep a notebook after I retire in 2026? I should. I heard myself describing to my class the value and impact that the notebook experience has had on me, leaving me to ask of myself, my students, and everyone else: Why don’t we carve out regular sessions? Why is the 40-minute session such an unusual activity, especially if it brings all those advantages I spoke of?

Today’s remembrance of Angelo goes back to 1986, his year of birth. In 1986, January 23 was on a Thursday too. That thought threw me back to Wednesday, January 22, 1986, when the labor pains started … early in the morning. Then, after the birth, nearly a day later (I’ve left out many details!), I left the hospital; I went to Walgreens to buy the $5 (a lot of money back then) Super Bowl preview/program; and then I actually went to my morning class with Dr. Mary Thale at UIC. The class was my Alexander Pope course. There were only three of us students in it; coming from a 2:30 AM birth, I guess I was kinda showing up the other two guys (who Dr. Thale thought were slackers in general). I was Dr. Thale’s favorite, since in those days I was a full-on scholar luxuriating in my nightshift security guard gig at the Wrigley Building. Never before or since have I ever been able to complete my reading and other assignments with such diligence (I think the magic of the marble walls and wrought brass elevator doors created a positively Burkean scene: act ratio of possibility). Ah scholarship. I was in the zone as a student—soon to be in the zone as a parent, Ph.D. candidate, home-owner, husband, and citizen. Ah, the 80’s and 90’s, a heady time for me in my thirties, as solutions and possibilities beckoned.

Before the seminar, I did let the group know that I had just come from the hospital. Such good news. Dr. Thale commented about a friend of hers who had shared his reaction with her upon seeing his first child, just after his birth. Her friend said, “I saw myself dead.” (That’s the kind of class it was.) I was taken aback, but she went on to explain, in a way, I suppose, that makes sense, about the circle of life, the coming of the new generation, and thus the eventual departure of the old generation. The comment was the kind of news Garrison Keillor might have brought from Lake Wobegon, which is part of the reason, I guess, it stuck with me.

I didn’t expect to be thinking of Dr. Thale this morning. Whenever I think of her, I think of how very old I thought she was at the time. Grey-haired, wiry frame, and bespectacled, she seemed an archetypal English professor. An archetypal, old English professor. An archetypal, old, female professor. I learned today, however, that back then, in 1986, she was only 62. I found that out because, in Google AI-ing her this morning, I found her obituary. She died in October of 2008 at the age of 84. RIP, dear Dr. Thale. These days, as I eye my own retirement (I am now 67, five years older than the ancient Thale)—and reflect on 1986, and the meaning of my time in graduate school, with professors like Dr. Thale, and my beloved Gene Ruoff (who I also just recently learned has died), my thoughts swirl and interconnect. What should I be aiming at? What is my legacy?

I’ve never looked upon Angelo (or any of my kids) with the result of me seeing myself dead. That’s all good. I wish I could look upon Angelo (and Mary Thale and Gene Ruoff) and not see them dead too. They all accomplished much, and there’s much to relish in each of them, and all the other loved ones I’ve lost, we’ve lost. I do look upon the whole of everything with sadness. What is the point? What lasts? In such thoughts, I recall the truisms I’ve come to rely on: just make the most of the time, while you have it; “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may” [Insert great Pope quote here!! Would I, were I still the scholar I was in 1986.]

The memories are the thing … I hope they stay. Even in so trivial a memory as attending Dr. Thale’s Pope class, and showing up my fellow classmates in passive aggressive ways, as was my wont, there is joy that sustains. Angelo, I wish you were here. But I don’t know: In a sense, you weren’t really there in that first dramatic week of your life, with the Bears winning the Super Bowl at age 3 days, and the Challenger exploding on that following Tuesday at age 5 days. But you were part of it then in your infant seat in front of the TV, and you were part of today, too, when we had the cake and told stories during and after the movie we shared in your honor. The shadows of your presence are with us each day. And the deeper parts, the person you were, stay with us, and grow, if only faintly. It’s a little more work these days to keep you right there, and it’s also just as easy to do so as ever. It’s a mystery. Happy Birthday, Ang!

Screen Salvation

September 26, 2024

Some are living with the apocalypse right in front of them. Others seem to be able to put it in their peripheral vision.

For the latter group, the apocalypse is something to be reminded of, as a caution, while they go about their lives, which have organizing principles and purposes that propel them and carry them along. These are the people who are raising children, doing essential jobs, basically, keeping the world on track amidst the hubbub of things. The former group, though, have been immobilized by the apocalypse. All has been lost, already, always already, and nothing is possible.

I put myself in the first group, because, I suppose, I feel I have experienced a loss so absolute that there’s no recovery from it, no way of pushing it to the side, no way of restarting and hitting my stride. That loss, of course, is Angelo. But death is something every human has to deal with; what I’ve experienced, everyone has, or will, in some version. Of course, everyone will experience it in a very personal, immediate way in their own death, if not through the loss of a child.

The apocalypse of a single death is as absolute, as devastating, for each individual as any other apocalypse, be it the Holocaust, a nuclear war, or end of the world through climate change or an asteroid strike. It’s weird to say that everyone will experience a loss equally as devastating as world-wide annihilation. But the stakes are high for each of us; rather, the stakes are beyond high; they are “all in,” always and everywhere. How does one function facing such an extremity? Clearly, we must learn to focus on other things.

This week I edited my screen saver. For some time, I had had only the Julie London quote about her singing: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.” Julie’s words were a friendly reminder to me, on a daily basis, of something I tried to describe some months back in my blog: “Such confidence, expressed with awareness and humility and precision. Not to mention, a good dose of sensuality, along with the promise of being together through it. The woes of the world would be lessened, I’m convinced, if we all just listened to, and spent time with, Julie London.” I would smile each time her words appeared on my screen.

I found myself this week needing, however, other reminders—or at least some glimpses of a non-apocalyptic lifestyle. I happened to come across St. Paul’s words, and it occurred to me that I needed to see them more often. I needed these words as an incantation, as an invocation to a better life than the one I had been living. Could this be my equipment for living, my distraction from the apocalypse? So I put them on my screen saver.

Then, with St. Paul and Julie London sitting there alone, I felt a need for some kind of connector—some statement that might round out the wisdom. These thoughts brought me to Kenneth Burke, and all the influence he has had on my life. That influence can’t be reduced to a single quotation, but his description of the “comic frame” in Attitudes Toward History does seem to partake of the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and the humility of Julie London’s celebration of her voice on the other.

So, here’s my screen saver in its current iteration:

Saint Paul, on letting God in: “Brothers and sisters: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed on the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Ephesians 4:30-5:2

Julie London, on her voice: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”

Kenneth Burke, on comic forgiveness: “The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.” Attitudes Toward History, p. 41

Angelo’s Screen Saver

I now notice that my introductory characterization of two of the quotations could be debated. For instance, was Burke really speaking about “forgiveness”? Or was that a reading I had imposed? Was I progressing a step beyond “enlightenment” to forgiveness, possibly as a natural effect of understanding/misunderstanding, and contextualization, and the necessity of error for all? I want there to be forgiveness. Also: Was St. Paul talking about “letting God in”? Or was this my wish—the wish that I might be able to abide by Paul’s request not to “grieve the Holy Spirit”? Paul talks of the seal of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the fragrant aroma of Christ’s sacrifice in which we are all suffused and made beneficiaries (I do notice he imports the holocaust of Christ’s sacrifice in this otherwise upbeat message). To me, he implies that we are somehow resisting it all; I know I have resisted giving up my grievances. Are they not keeping God out?

I hope these words, my companions on my screen, can keep on casting a spell on me. I need to look away from the ultimate devastation at my feet and in my sight. Kindness, love, humility—and intimacy too—I hope the reminders keep me upbeat and moving forward. I hope I can learn to push the apocalypse to the side, at least for part of the day, for part of my days that remain.

Not All Families Are Dysfunctional, Right?

February 15, 2024

As the world continues to spiral out of control, I find myself leaning on my friends. Some friends, though, I fear, are part of the problem. I’m thinking of the MSNBC crowd, who have become my companions in the wormhole. I can hear Glenn Kirschner’s voice, “Friends, I know it’s been long coming, but accountability in on its way.” He’s a comforting dad, a wise advisor, a trusted friend. He, like many in the MSNBC stable, dissolves the barrier between lofty expert and fellow sufferer. It’s remarkably humanizing; but it’s seductive and addictive too. How could we not be drawn in, and obsessively?

Andrew Weissmann is another who brings a dose of humanity to the cold and troubled world of law and politics and ultimate threats. His podcast, Prosecuting Donald Trump, with Mary McCord, is an unusual synthesis of legal reasoning and … giggling. The two hosts are comfortable talking through the maneuvers and principles and case history and possibilities—so much so that they have no fear letting their guard down in their podcast, showing at times their ignorance or personal quirks—and always their warm friendship and gentle teasing. The silliness is never that silly; it’s homey; it’s what it might feel like to have such experts living with you, sitting at your kitchen table, just being in the moment, along with all the momentous decisions and events they are committed to explain as best they can. I commend Andrew for his ability to turn on and off his professional expertise mode. I shouldn’t say “turn off,” since it’s never off; it’s just that he adds his personality and humanity in the podcast in ways we never really see when he’s on camera, where he’s pretty much all business. The subtext here is a kind of statement on how to manage all the baggage, the fallout, the potential despair of the topics being dissected. There’s logical principle, yes, but there’s also some larger, kinder, softer context. The two sides aren’t at odds. The full human being can be both analytical/world beating and humble/relaxed—and sweet with a friend sitting alongside you, even if she is in another state.

The tone of so many of the MSNBC hosts promotes this humane integration.

And so, what chance do I stand in not becoming too dependent on them? I think my first plunge into this milieu was motivated out of a desire to check something off—to get finished with this Trump business so that I could get on with my life. I find I have often approached life’s problems with a “just get this thing done,” or checklist, approach, as though progress were possible, if only, if only. What I needed to realize then, and now, is that what is needed is an “acceptance of the process” as the default state. It’s an illusion that we can ever get beyond [fill in the blank]. What is needed is the right processing of things.

Journalists have always gotten this. Part of their business is to keep the “news” new—and continuing. There are no endpoints. All that matters is the production and consumption of the stories. The pressures of these realities lead to conditions of sensationalizing and controversy-mongering that are all too well known by anyone in a literate, modern society. In the context of my current condition, I have come to rely on MSNBC folk to be my family. We’re never done with family; we don’t check them off. We just plan to be with them through the years.

In the throes of these dynamics, I sometimes glimpse a version of things where a good balance is found among (1) finished, checked-off outcomes; (2) humanizing “being with” the experts; (3) other things—all mixed together in the right proportions to round off a fully human engagement.

Finding this proper balance has always been a need or an endeavor to be embraced—whatever the world conditions and whatever one’s politics. However, the current state of communication (in general) and social media (in particular), in a hyper-connected, hyper-technologized, hyper-threatened world has made our present moment unlike any in history. Add the destabilizations of Covid, with all its isolations. Add further—perhaps most of all—the growing pains associated with the unearthing of bigotries that for so many years in a pre-technologized world were allowed to fester unseen, unknown.

The upshot: Psychological survival seems to demand that we retreat to our respective echo chambers, our “families,” just for the purpose of maintaining basic mental health.

Literature, philosophy, linguistics, and rhetorical theory—the stuff of my classes—should offer touchstones and foundations and routines on which to recover some stability. And while I feel empowered by the massiveness of uncertainty and method and humility (and appreciation) fostered by humanistic studies, I look on with sadness as the time for higher education seems to be receding. The reification of the university—like the reification of the fourth estate, or the reification of “democracy”—is dissolving before my very eyes, at Saint Xavier University, yes, but throughout our society, in its shorthand approaches to “information,” if not knowledge.

Maybe the term “growing pains” provides some hope? We’re always on the way to somewhere else, someplace that, if not an endpoint, might at least be a kind of benchmark or banked competence for “leveling up,” to borrow a concept from gaming culture. Even though we’re ever processing, surely some changes have registered. Maybe nothing so grand as an “arc of history bending towards justice.” But who can deny the improvements that the centuries have brought in regards to education and democracy and the good life? My family today is much larger than it ever could have been—even at earlier points in my own lifetime. Thank you, YouTube and MSNBC app and Xfinity.

I have always been optimistic that the changes being wrought, especially by technology, portend more benefit than threat. But the pains of growing towards that benefit, not to mention the existential threats of a world on fire, have tempered that optimism. If only we can survive…. Survival-—be it for today, the 2024 election, the tipping point—is more than a “check-off” outcome on my list, right?

Getting Started on Faculty Senate

September 15, 2023

I’m serving on a new Faculty Senate work group on the topic of “faculty development.” Our chair suggested we start by having him consult with current faculty leaders on campus who have responsibilities in this area. Our group was unanimous in agreeing that such conversations were a good starting place. As I responded to the email thread, I found myself revisiting some cherished memories of colleagues, two in particular, who helped transform SXU many years ago. Here’s my email:

I’m on board too […]. I do have one initial recommendation: We might want to add Julie McNellis to the list of people to consult. Maybe even Nancy Lockie (though I haven’t had contact with Nancy for a few years). Back in the nineties (maybe it was the eighties?), Julie and Nancy created the Center for Educational Practice, which was kinda a visionary professional development organization that was something of a forerunner of professional development offices in higher ed at a national level. The SXU of today probably shares more similarities to the SXU of that earlier time in terms of resources and investments in the educational mission. Possibly. But anyway, the office they created was a real startup of a university-wide organization that provided various services and resources to faculty at all levels of the career arc, in various disciplines, in technology, pedagogy, and every dimension of professional life. They roped me in early on and nurtured me in transformational ways. After a few years, we wrote a grant, for instance, to create the MTTA, the Midwest Technology Teaching Academy, which was funded by AT&T to support collaborative faculty development technology projects of teams of several member institutions (SXU, Loras, Alverno, and Holy Cross).

ANYWAY, I think it would be great to tap Julie for her stories about kickstarting an initiative like this, in an institution like this, in tight times like these. […] Just a thought—Angelo

Thinking about Julie and Nancy summons all that was good about SXU. I need to celebrate the blessings of them rather than grieve the soullessness of SXU, as I have been doing the past few years. Yesterday, while I was getting my MSNBC fix (alas), I heard that the Republican party had become the party of grievance—the place for old, white, privileged people, men primarily, to complain about change and lost status. I am uncomfortable with the extent to which my blog has become a grievance repository for an old, white, male, privileged professor. On the other hand, life at SXU has brought me so low—albeit only because, dialectically speaking, we had been so, so high. . . .

It was that illusion that progress was always forward-moving, that what was gained would remain and be built upon: that’s the source of the current grief that so stubbornly grips me. Of course, we knew there were no guarantees. But still we believed that progress was somehow to be counted on, taken for granted. Now all we have is destabilization—here in our own backyard, but so resoundingly amplified by crises everywhere, the climate problem, foremost of all, but also the threat to democracy, a much smaller, but still very large problem. With the climate issue, this whole experiment in humanity has been called into question, as we seem committed to seeing this sixth extinction through, like right away. How can we bank on anything? Then there’s the lost promise of education, the crushing of unions, and even, sigh, the pulling of the rug in sports.

This last one is big with me, I confess. I’m thinking of the loss of football—and I’m feeling it this fall on campus for some reason (it’s puzzling, since college football in autumn was never really part of my SXU routine). But it’s become impossible to lean into the joy of a football game, as the devastating effects come home, more and more pronounced. The morning news showed the benefit for Steve McMichael, who, immobilized in his struggle with ALS, moves us to tears, even if football per se might not be the definitive cause of his affliction. And earlier this week, there was the Aaron Rodgers injury. Much as I want to indulge in schadenfreude—I find it more painful than satisfying to see even him so afflicted.

Thinking about Julie and Nancy and SXU in 1996 (when I was hired) brings to mind the possibility of the “little engine that could.” Expectations were low, but hopes were high that we could go places. Our faculty had that tendency that academics have—letting ego have its way in judgments, sometimes quite mean ones, leveled as a pastime, elevating one by diminishing others. But the fundamentals of our community were solid. Faculty had a partnership with the administration; we had a union that fought behind the scenes with dignity and collegiality; we were functioning, more or less conventionally as an institution of higher education, in a context of dialogue and scholarship and teaching and community. The halls were filled with open doors (a lot of the time)—with faculty and students, in lively conversations, in and outside classrooms and offices.

The conversations were not tinged with the climate-change/demise-of-football/anti-labor/end-of-democracy doom of today—and they were not perfunctory as I am coming to see them in the SXU of 2023. At yesterday’s Faculty Senate meeting the provost shared his vision of “academic affairs.” He made his slides available, and I think we need, as a community, to perform a close reading of those slides—primarily to supply contexts that uncover just how vacuous the content is. As he spoke of assessment and hiring practices and program development and decision making, there was nothing to dispute. Who could argue with any of the principles, which, basically, could be summed up as “we must make good, informed decisions.”

But the devil is in the details. Look at the decisions that have been made in the Joyner years. The cutting of programs—and prior to that, the gutting of programs—has been so ill-considered and extreme that any future “good, informed decisions” have become more or less pointless. There’s nothing here to build on. There’s no hope.

So, I’m back to the grievance. But seriously: no philosophy, religious studies, English, Spanish, history, sociology, math? Just what do you need to have a university? At the least, you need a commitment to learning and study in these areas, right? And the justification that there is insufficient student demand for these subjects ignores the fact that the programs have been defunded and under-cut for years, all in the context of a reduction in our commitment to general education—all of which was unnecessary in the context of our programs and all of which has been destructive of any possibility for growth or recovery in a time of institutional upheaval.

Thinking of Julie and Nancy brings to mind those other times—do I call them halcyon days? What do you need for halcyon days? I guess, first of all, you need an assumption that something matters, that hope for betterment exists, that we can pull together. A little sunshine wouldn’t hurt. I’m not saying that those things are gone completely; but we have spiraled so.

We need to rebuild. Working with colleagues on the Senate work group creates a new opportunity. There is goodwill among these individuals, and so, perhaps there can be some kind of laying of groundwork.

But before we pretend to move on too far, the trauma of the Joyner years needs a reckoning. I find myself in a haze of uncertainty about where we are. Do we have a department? Do we have a major? Will there be any effort to address why such drastic program closures were put into effect without proper data analysis, or consideration of causes and effects?

We need to bring ourselves back to a Julie/Nancy moment of building something (perhaps out of nothing). I’d like to ask them how they found the initiative and courage and resources to spearhead a faculty development program at such a small and under-resourced institution.

I’d also like to thank them for their humanity, and all they’ve done for me—and so many—in such genuine ways. Not to mention the fun.